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If Kristi Noem never actually met the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, then how did that anecdote make it into her memoir? The answer, after these three stories from The Atlantic:

It’s not a rap beef. It’s a cultural reckoning. Trump flaunts his corruption. Who really has brain worms?

The Art of the Check

The newsletter you’re reading right now was reviewed by a fact-checker named Sam. Sam spent about an hour this afternoon scrutinizing my words and sentences, and making sure the quotes from my interviews match my recordings. You know what probably didn’t get that kind of review? The book on your nightstand. Or, as it happens, Noem’s new memoir.

Book publishers don’t employ fact-checking teams, and they don’t require a full fact-check before publication. Instead, a book is usually reviewed only by editors and copy editors—people who shape the story’s structure, word choice, and grammar. An editor might catch something incorrect in the process, and a lawyer might examine some claims in the book to ensure that the publisher won’t be sued for defamation. But that’s it. University presses typically use a peer-review process that helps screen for any factual errors. But in publishing more broadly, no one checks every date, quote, or description. It works this way at all of the Big Five publishers, which include HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House, Hachette, and Macmillan. (None of these publishers responded to my requests for comment.)

Whaaat?! you might be thinking, spitting that Thursday glass of merlot all over your screen as every book you’ve ever read flashes before your eyes. Was it all a lie? The answer is no. But books absolutely do go out into the world containing factual errors. For most books, and especially for memoirs, “it’s up to the author to turn in a manuscript that is accurate,” Jane Friedman, a publishing-industry reporter, told me.

A few writers will go out and pay for their own fact-checker. Many don’t—including, evidently, Noem, who, as you may have heard by now, shot her dog in a gravel pit. That incident, which the South Dakota governor wrote about in her memoir, No Going Back, seems to be true. But a passage about the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un is probably not. In the book, Noem claims to have met Kim during a congressional trip where he “underestimated” her. At least one former congressional staffer has said that that meeting never happened. And after being questioned about it, Noem’s office said it would be correcting a few errors in the book.

A simple fact-check could have prevented this particular embarrassment for Noem: A checker would have called others who were part of the delegation to verify whether the meeting had taken place. So why don’t publishers fact-check, to avoid this problem in the first place? From the publisher’s perspective, hiring a team of checkers is “a huge expense,” Friedman said—it would “destroy the profitability” of some books. And there are logistical challenges: Fact-checking memoirs, for example, can be difficult, because you’re dealing with people’s memories. But magazines do it all the time.

If authors want their work checked, they generally have to pay for it themselves. Many of my Atlantic colleagues have hired fact-checkers to review their books. But the process is cumbersome and expensive—the editorial equivalent of an “intensive colonoscopy,” as one colleague described it to me recently. The checker pores over every word and sentence of the book, using multiple sources to back up each fact. She listens to all of the author’s audio, reviews transcripts, and calls people to verify quotes. The whole process can take several weeks. One fact-checker I spoke with charges $5,000 to $8,000 for a standard nonfiction book. Others charge more. It makes sense, then, that, as Friedman said, the number of authors who opt for independent fact-checking “is minuscule.”

So what of Noem’s book? Her publisher, Center Street, which is a conservative imprint of Hachette, had a decision to make when the error was discovered: It could conduct an emergency recall of Noem’s books, pulling all of them back from bookstores and Amazon warehouses around the country, and print new, accurate copies, Kathleen Schmidt, a public-relations professional who writes the Substack newsletter Publishing Confidential, explained to me. But that would have been incredibly difficult, she said, given the logistics and extreme expense of both shipping and paper. Center Street issued a statement saying it would remove the Kim anecdote from the audio and ebook versions of No Going Back, as well as from any future reprints. (Noem’s team did not reply to a request for comment about her fact-checking process.)

This means that, for now, Noem’s book, which was officially released on Tuesday, will exist in the world as is. Many people will buy it, read it, and accept as fact that Noem once met—and was underestimated by—Kim Jong Un.

Books have always had a certain heft to them—sometimes literally, but also metaphorically. We tend to believe a book’s contents by virtue of their vessel. “People might be a little less likely to do that if they understood that the publisher is basically just publishing whatever the author said was correct,” Friedman told me.

Maybe this latest incident will spark a change in the publishing industry—but it probably won’t. For now, people should think critically about everything they read, remembering, Friedman said, “that [books] are fallible—as fallible as anything else.”

Related:

The blurb problem keeps getting worse. The wrath of Goodreads

Today’s News

Last night, President Joe Biden said that if Israel launches a large-scale invasion of Rafah, a city in southern Gaza, the U.S. would stop supplying Israel with certain weapons and artillery shells. House Democrats overwhelmingly joined Republicans in rejecting Representative Majorie Taylor Greene’s motion to oust House Speaker Mike Johnson. Barron Trump, Donald Trump’s 18-year-old son, was selected to be a Florida delegate at the Republican National Convention, where he will participate in nominating his father for president.

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: Scientists are debating whether concepts such as memory, consciousness, and communication can be applied beyond the animal kingdom, Zoë Schlanger writes. Time-Travel Thursdays: 50 years ago, the architect Peter Blake questioned everything he thought he knew about modern building, Sam Fentress writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Vartika Sharma for The Atlantic

A Fundamental Stage of Human Reproduction Is Shifting

By Katherine J. Wu

In recent decades, people around the world, especially in wealthy, developed countries, have been starting their families later and later. Since the 1970s, American women have on average delayed the beginning of parenthood from age 21 to 27; Korean women have nudged the number past 32. As more women have kids in their 40s, the average age at which women give birth to any of their kids is now above 30, or fast approaching it, in most high-income nations.

Rama Singh, an evolutionary biologist at McMaster University, in Canada, thinks that if women keep having babies later in life, another fundamental reproductive stage could change: Women might start to enter menopause later too. That age currently sits around 50, a figure that some researchers believe has held since the genesis of our species. But to Singh’s mind, no ironclad biological law is stopping women’s reproductive years from stretching far past that threshold. If women decide to keep having kids at older ages, he told me, one day, hundreds of thousands of years from now, menopause could—theoretically—entirely disappear.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

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Listen. The trailer for How to Know What’s Real, a new season of the How To podcast series (out on Monday). Co-hosts Megan Garber and Andrea Valdez explore deepfakes, illusions, misinformation, and more.

Read. The writer dream hampton thinks hip-hop is broken. But she can’t stop trying to fix it, Spencer Kornhaber wrote last year.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

A ton of inbreeding is required to produce purebred dogs—and it’s causing serious health problems for them, according to a recent New York Times column by Alexandra Horowitz, a cognitive scientist. Your Frenchie’s parents are likely more closely related than half-siblings! Your golden retriever might have parents that are genetically as close as siblings! Such inbreeding has consequences: A pug’s skull shape makes breathing difficult. German shepherds are prone to hip dysplasia. “As a species, we are so attached to the idea that we should be able to buy a dog who looks however we like—flat of face or fancy of coat—that we are willing to overlook the consequences” for them, Horowitz writes.

— Elaine

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.

Some 50 years ago, the architect and writer Peter Blake put himself on trial in the pages of The Atlantic. In a dramatic monologue equal parts polemic and confession, he pled guilty to having once upheld what he had come to see as the false precepts of architectural modernism: the insistence that a building’s design should express its function; the utopian faith in urban planning, giant public-housing towers, and prefabricated houses; even the presumption that cities—in new costumes of glass, steel, and concrete—would be the sites of an improved future civilization. A modernist by training, Blake believed that the movement had failed to produce either a more beautiful or a more equitable world in the postwar decades—and this failure necessitated a reconsideration of modernism’s basic tenets. Did form really follow function, or was that just a shibboleth? “The premises upon which we have almost literally built our world are crumbling,” he wrote, “and our superstructure is crumbling with them.”

The disillusionment had set in gradually. Blake, originally Blach, was born in 1920 to a Jewish family in Berlin. Following the rise of National Socialism, he, his mother, and his father all separately made their way to the United States; the Nazis eventually murdered many of their family members and neighbors. Before deploying in the war, Blake apprenticed as an architect in Philadelphia and began freelancing for Architectural Forum. In New York, the magazine’s headquarters, he became acquainted with the avant-garde: not just architects but painters, writers, furniture designers, and more.

Already there was grumbling about modernism. In 1948, responding to a takedown of the movement by The New Yorker’s architecture critic, Lewis Mumford, the young Blake sat on a Museum of Modern Art panel posing the question “What is happening to modern architecture?” A number of luminaries (all men) presented their case, but the report published in the museum’s bulletin concluded that the problem “remained unsolved.”

The issue became even more pressing in the next two decades as cities embraced programs of “urban renewal.” City officials, attracted by a veneer of novelty and efficiency, turned to modernist structures as a way to rehabilitate deteriorating low-income tracts of land—neighborhoods to which Black tenants were steadily relegated as the postwar federal government focused on subsidizing home ownership for white citizens. Public-housing projects, built on slum land that planners cleared using federal money, became avatars of modern design. (See the “tower in a park” units that became one of the prime targets of Blake’s 1974 polemic.)

After the war, criticism of modernism festered. Mumford found the modernists cold and impersonal; their buildings were too much like machines, neglecting “the feelings, the sentiments, and the interests of the person who was to occupy” them, he wrote. In 1961, Jane Jacobs, Blake’s former colleague at Architectural Forum, accused misguided planners of alienating cities from their “everyday diversity of uses and users” in The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Her field-upheaving book became the bible for skeptics of urban uniformity. “Does anyone suppose,” she wrote, “that, in real life, answers to any of the great questions that worry us today are going to come out of homogeneous settlements?”

In his 1974 essay for The Atlantic, Blake echoed Jacobs’s preference for density—and especially her disdain for the wide-open plazas that typically accompanied modern corporate skyscrapers. “The one sure way to kill cities,” he wrote, “is to turn their ground floors into great, spacious expanses of nothing.” But he also went further than Jacobs. In the essay’s final section, he wondered whether cities themselves were necessary to the future of humanity. In wealthy countries, he pointed out, developing technologies were rendering “many face-to-face communications unnecessary.” This wasn’t the world he was sure he desired, but in atoning for his generation’s sins, he pushed himself to the rhetorical limit:

Pretty soon the majority of Americans, and of people in other, industrialized nations, will be living in vast suburban tracts … our old downtown areas will become tourist attractions, probably operated by Walt Disney Enterprises, and kept much cleaner and safer and prettier by the Disney people than our present bureaucracies maintain them now.

His hypothetical became only more feverish:

They will become quaint historic sites, like Siena and Carcassonne and the mad castles of Ludwig of Bavaria, visited by suburbanites on package tours conducted by tape-recorded tourist guides. Rockefeller Center and other beauty spots will be viewed as quaint shrines erected by earlier and more primitive civilizations; and the only housing in these vacation spots will be Hilton Hotels or Howard Johnson’s Motor Inns, plus a few ghettos containing workers needed to clean the sidewalks and change the light bulbs.

Blake’s assault on modernism coincided with New York City’s economy teetering on the edge of collapse. The city had indebted itself precariously for years to balance the budget, but its then-mayor, Abe Beame, was running the city’s credit further into the ground with a spree of short-term borrowing. In November 1974, soon after The Atlantic published Blake’s essay, Beame announced the largest round of city-employee layoffs since the Great Depression.

Remarkably, Beame found time to personally respond to Blake. In a letter published in The Atlantic’s November 1974 issue, he expressed exasperation with several of Blake’s arguments. But Beame saved his greatest ire for Blake’s broader pessimism about cities. Electronic technology would never fully replace face-to-face communication, Beame knew from the regular walks he took around his neighborhood. “You can’t get that kind of human contact and enrichment out of a tube!”

Blake’s essay reflected the panicked condition of New York; it also marked the frenzied peak of a decades-long critique of modernism. In the years that followed, the movement’s shortcomings were deployed to justify the demolition of welfare programs, city planning, and (in the most literal sense) public housing. In his attempt to resuscitate New York’s economy, Beame’s successor, Ed Koch, poured money into private development, subsidizing the construction of luxury apartment buildings and corporate high-rises, some of which became New York’s classically “postmodern” structures.

More recently, some politicians in New York State have been debating legislation they hope will spark a construction boom akin to that of the modernist postwar decades; one recent bill proposes the creation of a “social housing” authority that would prioritize affordable units. In New York City, the linked crises of housing and homelessness are as pressing as ever, and many of the questions Blake and Jacobs wrestled with remain: Is more housing supply the way out? If so, who will build it? If private developers, can Americans trust them with our tax dollars?

Lingering as well is the question contained in the arc of Blake’s career: What does one find after turning away from the vision of an ideal city? In a memoir near the end of his life, Blake wrote fondly, if apprehensively, of the political idealism of the 1930s and 1940s, reserving his criticism for the excesses of corporate capitalism (to which some modern architects, he believed, had fallen prey) and authoritarianism (which he had come to see, in postwar-liberal fashion, as a symptom of idealism itself). By the end of his career, Blake was more than prepared to forfeit the dream of a perfectly built world in favor of reality’s chaotic and diverse one. He often invoked this paraphrase of Mumford: “Life is really more interesting than utopia.”